For small to medium, local businesses, going to Google and typing in their products and services can be discouraging. Major national companies like Amazon and Trulia often dominate search results, making smaller businesses feel like it’s impossible to compete. But there is one thing they have over the big boys – their location. Google now places a huge emphasis on…
Google Sheets is one of my favorite web applications. It’s quick, lightweight, and easy to use. For those of you not familiar with Google Sheets, it’s Google’s web-based spreadsheet application. While creating tabular data is the main function of this application, did you know that you can also create dynamic, embeddable charts based on these data values? Let’s take a…
Shooting your own photos is a great way to create authentic content for your website while showing off your work. You don’t always need a professional photographer or special equipment to take great photos, either. Knowing some photography basics can help you take high quality photos with a basic digital camera or even your phone. This is part one of…
It’s not a secret that photographs provide a nice visual experience for people, and text helps convey the message you are trying to communicate. That is why the pattern of placing text on top of large photographs has been a prominent technique in web design for the last few years. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds. There are…
This post is a follow up to my previous Setup Android Lollipop Emulator on OS X post which covered the basics of setting up an Android emulator on your machine. Today, let’s take a look at setting up an iOS simulator on OS X. Download and Install Xcode Currently, Apple doesn’t provide a stand-alone simulator app. What you’ll need to do…
HTML pages are not always better than PDFs. For example, if the main goal is for the user to print something or scroll through a brochure or catalog, PDFs can provide an admirable experience. However, posting an effective PDF to your website can be challenging because search engines may not be able to crawl them, or users may not know…
What is SVG? SVG, or Scalable Vector Graphics, is an XML-based language format supporting two-dimensional graphics. SVG images are comprised of vector-based shapes which are generated by mathematical equations. SVG is nothing new. In fact, SVG was introduce all the way back in the year 2001 (13 years!). But only in the last few years has SVG been fully embraced…
In this two-part series, I cover testing a Rails application using RSpec and some other popular gems. If you missed Part 1, head over to Testing Rails 4 Apps With RSpec 3: Part I to get caught up first. In Part 2, with the setup out of the way, we’ll dive into writing tests for the various components of a Rails…
If you’ve been surfing the web or looking for current web trends then you probably noticed that large engaging photography has become a prominent trend in more recent website design. But finding compelling photos that are high resolution and meet your target audience needs can be extremely difficult. Most stock photo sites either provide super cheesy photos of business people shaking…
If you don’t already know, a 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the user was able to communicate with your website server, but the server could not find the page requested. A user can come across a 404 error page for a few different reasons. Either the user entered in the wrong…
